As mobile devices gain in popularity, a variety of mobile applications continue to be developed for users to perform a variety of tasks. For example, users may use a camera integrated into or otherwise connected to a mobile device to upload images of documents, which may provide a mobile application with data for use in providing a variety of services such as tax preparation, expense tracking, record keeping, and the like. In some cases, however, a document may be very large and contain text with a very small font size. In such cases uploading an image that captures the entire document in one frame may result in the mobile application being unable to recognize the text contained in the image or extract any information from it. In addition, viewing the uploaded document in the user interface of the mobile application may provide the user with a suboptimal user experience because the document may not be legible.
A number of methods have been developed to detect the size of text contained in a document but they are all computation intensive and inefficient thereby providing no use in cases where a font size may need to be detected in very little time, such as during the few seconds of when a user is attempting to capture an image of a document by, for example, holding the camera of a mobile phone over the document while providing a live camera feed thereof.